[Air-L] facebook ethnic diversity?

gustavo gustavo at soc.haifa.ac.il
Fri Dec 18 05:27:12 PST 2009


More on this issue, selection bias is present.
According to the 2009 Report for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
Education Fund by
Robert W. Fairlie University of California, Santa Cruz and
National Poverty Center, University of Michigan

"The Digital Divide in the US is large and does not appear to be
disappearing soon. Blacks and Latinos are much less likely to have access
to home computers than are white, non-Latinos (50.6 and 48.7 percent
compared to 74.6 percent). They are also less likely to have Internet
access at home (40.5 and 38.1 percent compared to 67.3 percent).
• Asians have home computer and Internet access rates that are higher than
white, non-Latino rates (77.7 and 70.3 percent), and Native Americans have
lower rates (51.6 and 40.9 percent)."

>From here the study of Facebook has an implicit sample selection bias.
Minorities are less likely to have access. Individuals that belong to
minorities groups and have access are a selected group of highly skilled
and educated that are not different in their social characteristics to the
whites having access. Facebook results do not reflect the state of social
and digital inequalities in the population. Furthermore, is blurres the
real divisions in society.

Gustavo Mesch, Associate Professor
University of Haifa.
Chair, Communication and Information Technologies Section
American Sociological Association

On Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:59:11 +0100, Nils Zurawski
<nils.zurawski at uni-hamburg.de> wrote:
> which facebook is meant? The North American one? 
> What about facebook in general? then those 
> "ethnic" categories would not work, because, if 
> you take the global perspective, facebook is as 
> diverse as the countries from which its 
> participants come... I find this survey rather 
> limited and of no great use beyond the US/Canada 
> (if that is included anyway).
> 
> Also, those categories would be useless anywhere 
> else in the world... facebook in Asia - how about 
> asian ethnicities there???
> 
> best
> 
> nilz
> 
> At 23:34 Uhr +0200 17.12.2009, =?ISO-8859-9?Q?Didem_T=FCrko=F0lu?= wrote:
>>Personally I found it quite repulsive in terms of using the discourse of
>>diversity (thus reenacting racial and ethnic boundaries) for marketing
>>purposes. Am I overpessimistic?
>>Didem
>>
>>2009/12/17 live <human.factor.one at gmail.com>
>>
>>>  I found it quite interesting.
>>>  I was intrigued and surprised by the relative saturation of Asian
>>>  users.
>>>
>>>  (Btw Facebook's sociologist is Cameron from MIT Media Lab, and they
>>>  sourced
>>>  from Census Genealogy and used mixture modeling, so I feel comfortable
>>>  about
>>>  how the data was gathered and used.)
>>>
>>>
>>>  -Sharon
>>>
>>>  -------------------------
>>>  Sharon Greenfield
>>>  Marylhurst University
>>>  http://www.sharoncountry.com
>>>  @SharonG
>>>
>>>
>>>  On Dec 17, 2009, at 3:57 AM, Seda Guerses wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>  i am very curious to hear what people on this list think of this note
>>>>  from
>>>>  facebook?
>>>>  s.
>>>>
>>>> 
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=205925658858&id=8394258414&ref=mf
>>>>
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